Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday February 27, 2013 @11:56PM
from the you-are-not-the-things-you-own dept.

An anonymous reader writes "While speaking at the TED Conference in California earlier today, Sergey Brin seemingly tried to set the stage for a world where using Google Glass is as normal as using a smartphone. What's more, Brin went so far as to say that using smartphones is 'emasculating.' Brin said that smartphone users often seclude themselves in their own private virtual worlds. 'Is this the way you're meant to interact with other people,' Brin asked. Are people in the future destined to communicate via just walking around, looking down, and 'rubbing a featureless piece of glass,' Brin asked rhetorically. 'It's kind of emasculating. Is this what you're meant to do with your body?' Is wearing futuristic glasses any better?"
Another reader sends in an article that also muses on our psychological connection to our devices. Or, as he puts it, the "increasingly weird and perhaps overly intimate relationship we have with our gadgets; the fist we touch when awake, the last at night. Our minds have become bookended by glass."

Sergey just doesn't get it. My Android phone is a big swinging phallic symbol, especially when it does those 3D maps.... iPhone toting hipster chicks never fail to notice. Got plenty of mileage out of that, opposite sex wise. Sergey just doesn't know how to hold it.

For at least two thousand years of European history until the late nineteenth century hysteria referred to a medical condition thought to be particular to women and caused by disturbances of the uterus (from the Greek "hystera" = uterus)

Fun fact: when Google introduced Wave, they announced that it had superior contextual spell checking, and could (for example) correct "your" vs "you're". I tried plugging in that poem (on Docs) to see what would happen, and...